This page contains a selection of the software that I wrote during, or for, my various projects. An(other) more or less complete overview is given in my CV. This list will probably continue growing, but the most important programmes that I am willing to release into the public domain are listed. I'd be pleased if some of them turned out to be of use to others. Please, keep me informed about any problems, applications, and most importantly, about changes/updates that you make to the code! I am not quite an ace for versions, revisions etc. The only reliable version indication is (usually) the date of the distribution archive itself, and of the files contained within. I would love to have that displayed on this page each time I upload a new version, but I doubt that's possible without delving deeper than I want into the intricacies of the world wide wait.

Graphing/Analysis:

xgraph. An X11 plotting programme. Original code by David Harrison, further developed, extended and polished by me. It is a programmable 2D graphing/analysis programme. Various combinations of scatter, line and intensity plots relevant for scientific use, which can be extended using drawing primitives available through the built-in language. Includes extensive support for user-defined transformations, data-processing and data-generation. There are also several options to quickly and easily "wander" through (explore) a collection of data sets, manually and under automatic control (which means animations are possible; see the MorBurr99c.xg example!). The arithmetic module is a further developed version of an earlier written toolkit, including a custom parser-compiler for fast evaluation of (repeated) algebraic expressions (trees) and support for named scalars, arrays and procedures. It has been and still is my programme of choice for anything from quickly looking at data to complicated processing. Outputs to PostScript™ and through that to (almost) any format you want (a script to convert to pdf using Ghostscript is included). Known to run under HPUX 8.05 (quite a while ago!), Irix 5.3 through 6.3 and Linux; Mac OS X (10.2/3 and probably higher). It is likely to run on anything similar and reasonably standard. 200204: major updates significantly improving the speed of the internal programming language! 200605: loadable embedded Python interpreter, interfaced with the internal programming language (ascanf). Only tested on Mac OS X (10.3.9) for the moment, and probably requires Python 2.4 (and Numpy, the successor to Numeric and numarray).

Have a look at the README, or download the source tarball (bzip2ed, close to 1Mb), or download a compiled binary for a Pentium class Linux system (bzexe'ed; not always up to date!!). There is also a big collection of example files. The source for a little utility, gtk-shell, that implements a file selector dialog can be found here. (This is not mine; it comes from gxedit).

Miscellaneous

Less. This is a version of version 1.77 of the popular (?) replacement for more. It is thus not quite the most uptodate... What makes it different is that it acts not only as a more-or-less simple textfile viewer. Of course, any less will display any file it has permission to read. But this version will, for a number of often occurring file formats, display the information in human-readable form. Thus, it will uncompress (gzip, bzip2, compress, …) the data (not the file) if needed, before showing it (you can also edit the file with a commandline option); show the contents of tar and zip files. When viewing a nroff formatted manpage, it will do the formatting, etc. `less +vq file.gz` will uncompress, edit and re-compress the named file.

Download the source tarball.

Vscanf. An extension to the standard C library for those systems that do not have the variadic versions of scanf(), fscanf() and sscanf(), or vsnprintf(). A variadic function is one that takes a variable number of arguments. scanf() c.s. of course do that, but you have to know these arguments at compile time. Like with printf() c.s. –- only for those, the standard C lib has foreseen variadic variants: vprinf() c.s. Vsnprintf() is like vprintf(), except that it never writers more than n bytes into the designated buffer.

Download the source tarball (bzip2ed). This code has been isolated from the GNU glibc 2.1.1 code, and altered to function as a standalone, and with compilers other than gcc. It is distributed under the same copyright/license as the original glibc. The vsnprintf() comes from R v1.5.0 (http://r-project.org); it is distributed under R's license. Used in XGraph on systems where it is needed.

Extended libraries, CX and GrafTool. These contain routines that I developed over the years during my PhD research. I still use them with a certain regularity, so they (may) still evolve. CX contains, among others, a set of routines to maintain an internal symbol table (for those working extensively with pointers) and an internal stack tracing mechanism. Another set of CX modules (the "vars" family) allows variables to be exported and edited via a unified commandline/batchfile interface (scalars, arrays, commands); I use these routines to configure (and control) simulation and stimulus programmes. The programming language available in XGraph is a descendant of these routines. Graftool contains a variety of X11 convenience routines that are somewhat outdated but might be of example/use (there is currently a problem with it under Irix/Xsgi: see the 20020131 remarks. Also, a generic close/reopen, change colourmap issue. Any help would be appreciated!).
New – 2030710: CX now contains a stand-alone version of the 'vars' routines, including the symbol table and tracing routines. This version runs (with very slight differences) also under M. Visual C (a project file is included; see the vars-standalone subdirectory.

Download CX. Download GrafTool (needs CX; contains a small part of the XGraph distribution that needs to be installed if XGraph is not installed [where it is expected...]). Both tar archives are gzipped.

Pazuzu. This is a utility programme intended mainly for a particular kind of Assyriologists. Namely those that work on the Macintosh platform with a set of transcription fonts designed by Mr. D.C. of Paris. These 2 families, CunéiType1 and Mari, have a very peculiar encoding vector (computer alphabet) that makes it impossible to use them on any other platform. I designed another set of 2 families, Palatino Nisaba and Palatino Cuneitype, that can be used on Mac and PC. Pazuzu does the necessary to convert an RTF file saved on the Macintosh to an RTF file that can be read on Mac or PC, and that uses Palatino Nisaba and Palatino Cuneitype instead of CunéiType1. It can also do only the platform conversions. Currently, this programme has a very simple interface, and runs under Linux and Windows (in a DOS command window). I hope to be able to provide a Mac version at some time!

Download Windows programme. This version requires the Cygwin library, that can be found here. Install the .dll contained in this archive in your Windows directory.

Download Linux programme (compiled for Intel Pentium).

Download the sourcecode. If you implement this on another platform (Mac graphics interface – OSX/shell should be easy!), please let me know!!!

Various tools, including a brain-dead commandline calculator, tab expansion and the inverse, utilities to do batch DNS lookups (also reverse; the hostnm command also integrates a whois client – nifty for "spambatting"), determine the name of the host you're logging in from, etc. May be useful to someone…

Download Tools. Tar archive, gzipped.

Rclock-2.7.9 . This is the version from the rxvt-2.7.9 "lightweight terminal" distribution, to which I added a couple of fun options. One in honour of popular French and Dutch wisdom that has it that Belgians always have things backwards (among other things of course). The other is in honour of the EC which/who always wants to have things its/their way. We Europeans don't like the 12-hour AM/PM system? Great, let's have one of two versions of 24-hour clocks!!

Download rclock-2.7.9. Tar (source) archive, bzipped.

Py_RJVB . This is a small collection of Python extensions, not all of them completely mine. Included as of this writing: HRTime (interface with high resolution timers on Mac OS X and Linux), rtsched (interface to [realtime] process priority control) and sincos (interface to the sincos function which exists in hardware on e.g. x86 platforms, but even the C software version is faster than separate calls to sin and cos).

Download Py_RJVB. Tar (source) archive, bzipped.

Backdrops for the desktop. The only one that I actually created myself as of this writing is the one called SeAqua.png . The green metal thingy is actually Apple's metal texture colourised (and slightly blurred) to my taste. The HT* ones are adaptations of samples of Harris Tweed tissues (from this site), done using Graphic Converter.
Or
Ceci n'est pas une pipe…

Download Backdrops. Tar archive, bzip2ed.